In order to effectively market products and services to consumers both on and off the World Wide Web (the “Web” or “WWW”), it is necessary to collect accurate and relevant information regarding consumers and their purchasing habits. One way that Web sites have traditionally collected information is through the use of Web survey applications. Web survey applications conduct online surveys by providing a user with an input form that includes a number of questions along with input fields in which to provide answers to the questions. The user may then answer the survey by typing an answer for each question into the input fields. When the user has completed the survey, the user may transmit the provided answers back to the Web survey application. The survey answers may then be utilized, along with other user's answers to the survey, to better market the concerned product or service.
While Web survey applications are able to gather a great deal of information from a user, they are not without their drawbacks. The main drawback associated with Web survey applications stems from the fact that the lifetime of the Web survey application and the survey questions themselves are frequently different. For instance, a marketing group may provide a Web site that includes a survey for a particular type of product. The survey may include questions on customer satisfaction with the particular product and may be utilized for 90 days. After the survey is completed, the marketing group may wish to change the survey questions to focus on another type of product for a different time period. Changing the survey questions, however, can be very time consuming and expensive.
With prior art Web survey applications it is very difficult to change the application to provide a new set of survey questions. In particular, changing survey questions typically requires writing new application code to support the new questions, testing the new application code, and then deploying the new application code. This process be time consuming and expensive. What is needed, therefore, in light of these problems, is a Web survey engine that is reusable and that does not require program code to be modified in order to implement a new Web survey.